Visitor frustration – unnecessary roadblocks and dead-ends – sends potential buyers away. Such enhancements as highly intuitive Solr on-site search improves the prospects for high online sales 

DENVER, CO – Ecommerce software has become a highly sophisticated environment, powering hundreds of thousands of online merchant websites which rang up an estimated $194.3 billion in U.S. sales during 2011, up 16% from the $167.3 billion in online sales for 2010, according to statistics from the U.S. Commerce Department.

That the online sector of the overall retail marketplace is a growing powerhouse is axiomatic. The Commerce Department, in its annual e-commerce sales report issued Feb. 16, 2012, says e-commerce in 2011 accounted for 4.6% of all U.S. retail sales – but if you exclude retail categories not usually purchased online, like automobiles, fuel, grocery and foodservice sales, the publication Internet Retailer estimates that e-commerce last year rang up 8.6% of total retail sales. 

The Commerce Department noted that all retail sales in the U.S. last year, including ecommerce, totaled $4.2 trillion, a jump of 7.9% over the 2010 tally, but the numbers clearly show that that the double-digit growth numbers posted in the ecommerce sector make online retailing the go-to marketplace.

Plus, many traditional brick-and-mortar retailers are discovering their online merchandizing to be a desirable shopping place even for those customers who eventually purchase the product in a traditional store. These customers use the web to find product, research it, price it, and increasingly to compare notes with other consumers. And with new mobile-device apps for instant price comparisons from traditional an online stores alike, the ecommerce marketplace is forcing drastic changes on both large and small stores to deal with more-informed shoppers and higher levels of competition, particularly on price, not only from neighboring stores but the national ecommerce marketplace as well.

But the ecommerce marketplace can be a mercurial place indeed. Where once there were only a handful of local brick-and-mortar retailers which stocked a product, now there are literally thousands of options in the ecommerce universe where there is fierce competition for recognition, on price and, increasingly, free or reduced-cost shipping charges. Ecommerce merchants, in order to cut through the exploding clutter, must constantly employ any number of techniques to raise their rankings in the search engines, maintain their reputations from sometimes even anonymous yet effective attacks, and to convert “visitors” into “buyers.”

Conversion rate

While every technique is critical and changes quickly, this last point is critical. Statistics show that only something like 1.5% to 2% of online store website visitors actually stay engaged through to a purchase – and this is measured by a statistic called conversion rate.

There is a growing level of art and science going into boosting conversion rates and like everything else on the web it has a name: Conversion Rate Optimization, or simply CRO.

One of the key techniques deployed in CRO is something called A/B Testing. Studies clearly show that website and store design and structure play a significant role in CRO. Products featured in home-page windows sometimes sell better, and sometimes online merchants find that product displayed on a page dominated by the color red or with bigger headlines or any number of attributes get more views and sales – or conversely fewer sales – than products displayed with other design elements. In A/B testing the idea is to measure differences or introduce changes to compare what attracts more eyes and boosts CRO. In other words, A versus B; if B tests better, then both pages and presentations are switched to the more powerful design elements. It could be color, font, too much copy or not enough, photographs – anything. And it might be different in the desktop presentation versus the smartphone display versus the notepad display.

Another technique used to boost CRO is to streamline or smooth navigation on the site. Study after study shows that frustrated shoppers simply hit the “x” and leave the site, sometimes even on the brink of completing checkout. This can be caused by any number of issues, such as slow page loading, “404” errors (page not found), cumbersome “set up an account” process, the inability to change customer profile information, or too many pop-ups, come-ons or up-sells.

Searching

One of the largest frustrations, however, is the on-site search function. Almost all of the software that drives ecommerce – platforms like Magento, Big Commerce, PrestaShop, and many others – use a relatively simple form of on-site search that is essentially a structured database finder. It only indexes, or reads for relevancy, from the tags and names – the attributes – that the site operator designates. For instance, it can find a “screwdriver” or a “”Craftsman Screwdriver” because those terms have been entered into the search database, but it can’t scroll the product description text to find a “magnetic screwdriver” unless that term is specified. Moreover, if the searcher misspells the term being searched, these structured database search mechanisms will yield no results.

In response, many of the more sophisticated ecommerce operations are turning off the built-in search function and replacing it with an Enterprise search capability that can search both structured and unstructured data throughout the site.

The leading type of Enterprise search being employed on ecommerce sites today is called Solr – or Apache Solr, a highly intuitive replacement for on-site search that improves the site visitor experience, boosts the conversion rate for online sales, and streamlines web store administration.

Solr is an open source enterprise search platform from the Apache Lucene project, and includes such major features as powerful full-text search, hit highlighting, faceted search, dynamic clustering, database integration, rich document (e.g., Word, PDF) handling, and geospatial search. Solr is highly scalable, providing distributed search and index replication, and it powers the search and navigation features of many of the world's largest internet sites.

The advantages of Solr online merchants are impressive. The typical on-site search capability built-in to the shopping platform is limited to a very rigid set of keywords and attributes set up by the merchant in a structured database, so site visitors and merchants alike have to be very specific to yield search results that match the products and services sought. This often results in dead ends or multiple searches, both frustrating roadblocks known to prompt shoppers to leave the site entirely.

Solr, however, digs deep into all content on a website, delivering more search results, better results, and even including the functionalities of recognizing and correcting for spelling errors, and highlighting key words so visitors can better find what they are looking for. Solr searches, or indexes, the entire site, including the content of such unstructured data sources as PDF files, word documents, Excel spreadsheets, user-generated files, emails, marketing information, forums, visitor comments, blogs, news releases and more – rich data areas generally invisible to structured database search engines.

For the online merchant Solr is highly flexible and an excellent source of business intelligence. Web store operators employing Solr, for instance, can tune search results to display desired products first, like a particular brand, sale items, high-margin items, or top-selling products to drive sales toward specific business objectives. Moreover, Solr keeps tabs on site visitor search terms and click-throughs, so merchants can quickly and constantly identify what works and what doesn’t to hone their site into a more targeted sales machine.

Solr (http://lucene.apache.org/solr/) is part of the Apache Lucene project which is an open source and free information retrieval software library supported and licensed by the Apache Software Foundation. The foundation is a community of developers dedicated to FOSS – free and open source software – and states that “The Apache projects are defined by collaborative consensus based processes, an open, pragmatic software license and a desire to create high quality software that leads the way in its field.” Along with Apache Solr, the Apache Projects include such software as Apache Lucene, Apache PyLucene, and Apache Open Relevance.

Here at Unleaded Group we are constantly on the lookout for solutions that boost the ability of ecommerce merchants to deliver sales and profits to their bottom lines, and we have found that with Solr. We are deploying it on ecommerce sites using the Magento Enterprise level ecommerce solution and our experience is that visitors who find more and better results in their on-site searches stick around and ultimately boost conversion rates.

In other words, Solr search eliminates one of the major obstacles in ecommerce for higher sales. We think that is a great bottom line. 

Unleaded Group (http://www.unleadedgroup.com/), founded as Unleaded Software in Denver in 1996, is one of the oldest website design and development firms in the Rocky Mountain region. The agency has built thousands of websites for corporate clients, organizations, and individuals throughout the world, and has taken a leadership role nationally in the development of ecommerce websites. As a Gold Solution Partner with Magento, Unleaded Group has designed and developed more than 150 online ecommerce retail stores for clients, with a portfolio that encompasses ecommerce sites for Fortune 500 companies and mom-and-pop shops alike, in such industries as hardware, real estate, travel, food service and grocery, toys, footwear, automobile accessories, winter sports, solar accessories, and more.